XXVI. 
to work, and furnished the channels through which much of his munificent liberality 
began and continued to flow; and further, as apart from the necessary compliance with 
the legal forms requisite to give effect and permanence to his intended benefactions, 
he has left almost nothing on record except in connection with the operations of these 
Societies, it becomes necessary in further considering the subject in hand to touch 
briefly upon some of the more important features of their history. 
With what might almost be called hereditary tastes, or at least with the influence 
and example of his distinguished relatives, and with the opportunity of access to the 
Macleay Collection and library, it is hardly surprising that sooner or later Sir William 
Macleay should have begun to take a warm interest im natural history, and more 
particularly entomology. What at the time might at first sight have seemed 
surprising—though his subsequent career has now dissipated any ground for surprise 
—is that even at this early period, at the very outset of his career as a working 
naturalist, he should have been possessed with the desire not merely to do some 
useful work himself and that for love of it, but to see and to encourage united and 
organised effort, and this without attempting to arrogate to himself any air of 
patronage, without any assumption of dictatorship, but rather in a spirit of comrade- 
ship—an earnestness of purpose, and a breadth of view which characterised him for 
the rest of his life. 
The Macleay Collection passed to him by inheritance on the death of Mr. W. 8. 
Macleay in 1865; but before this he had possessed for some years a small collection 
of foreign insects ; and as the result of his own collecting he had both added to the 
Macleay Collection, and commenced an Australian collection of his own. In 1861 
he began to accumulate material on a more elaborate and systematic scale ; for in this 
year Mr. Masters went under Sir William’s auspices on an extended collecting tour 
to Port Denison, then newly settled ; and some of his early papers were based on the 
examination of this material. Mr. Damel, in like manner, spent twelve months in 
Fiji on a similar errand. Exactly how far and in what way the acquisition of the 
valuable collections so obtained may have helped on the formation of the Entomo- 
logical Society of New South Wales, which was founded shortly afterwards, it is not 
now possible to determine. 
On April 7th, 1862, a preliminary meeting of a few gentleman interested in 
entomology was held at Sir William Macleay’s residence, when the desirability of 
founding a local Entomological Society was affirmed, and a committee appointed to 
draw up rules and make arrangements. The justification for such a step was to be 
found in the facts that two important zoological collections were domiciled in Sydney, 
that though a Scientific Society had long been in existence in New South Wales, little 
